This November, voters in Lowell (MA) will have the opportunity to improve the city’s voting system with proportional voting. The city Election Office announced yesterday that a question regarding choice voting, a form of proportional representation, will be on the Lowell city ballot in the upcoming elections.

After an impressive signature gathering effort, organizers and volunteers from Fair Vote Lowell have turned in well over the number of required signatures for a city ballot measure. Lowell currently elects both City Council and School Committee using an at-large, winner-take-all system. The same choice voting electoral system on the ballot in Lowell will be used this November for the first time in Minneapolis for park board elections and once again for City Council and School Committee in Cambridge (MA)--which uses the same voting equipment used in Lowell. Meanwhile, the town of Euclid (OH) will use a similar proportional system for their school board elections this fall.

A broad coalition of reformers in Massachusetts have a launched a campaign to put instant runoff voting for statewide offices on the 2010 ballot. Proponents aim to collect 100,000 signatures this fall The Voter Choice initiative will be the first statewide implementation of IRV, giving all of Massachusetts’ voters the chance to rank their preferences and to be free of worries over the spoiler effect in elections for state offices.

This development comes on the heels of the petition drive launched by David Winters, candidate lieutenant governor of Illinois. Winters, currently a Republican state senator from Rockford, has launched a referendum campaign that would restore cumulative voting (a form of proportional voting) to the Illinois House, a move which would make the legislature more competitive and more reflective of the state’s voters – and encourage more transparency in a state noted for corruption in recent years.

FairVote's Rob Richie and Paul Fidalgo offer a way to give everyone a say in presidential nominations while retaining the valuable state-by-state evaluation process. This piece also ran in McClatchy's newswire.